List all the drivers on your system
Drivers are software that tell Windows how to interface to something. They are needed for your hardware like printers and video cards and many other components. Out-of-date or incorrect drivers are often a source of problems. The need for new drivers is always one of the trouble spots when a new operating system is introduced. This has certainly been true for Vista. There are a number of ways to check what drivers and what versions are on your system but Nir Sofer has provided a nice free Windows XP utility called DriverView. It needs no installation other than being unzipped to a folder in a convenient place. It provides quite a bit of information about your drivers and is a worthwhile utility.
DriverView isn’t rated to work in Vista but you can use a command-line utility (also in XP Pro but not Home). Open a command prompt and enter “driverquery” (without quotes). The list may take a minute and scroll off the screen so it is best to redirect the list to a text file as discussed in Command-line tip #4. This command does not provide all the information that Sofer’s program gives but it is easier to use than Device Manager, which is another place to obtain driver information for Windows systems.
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